Topics, sentence accent, ellipsis: a proposal for their formal treatment

Summary

Introductory note

My goal in this paper is a very modest one. I cannot even begin to discuss the numerous empirical aspects of the phenomena listed in the title, nor can I give a survey of the literature on these subjects in a short paper of this sort. All I can reasonably attempt here is to suggest an explication of the three concepts topic, sentence accentuation, and ellipsis, which may at best be the concepts associated with these expressions by several linguists, and at worst, are only my own. I will do this by making a proposal for the representation of the semantics of topicality, of sentence accentuation, and of ellipsis – as I understand these expressions – in natural generative (NG) grammar. This theory of grammar is characterized in Vennemann (1971 and 1973a) and in Bartsch and Vennemann (1972). My remarks here are an extension of ideas and notation in Bartsch (1972, especially chapter 4) and are drawn to a large extent from the third section of Vennemann (1973b).

In formulating my remarks, I shall try to abide by a methodological principle which was used as a procedural guideline in Bartsch and Vennemann (1972), e.g. chapter 6.1, where we give different semantic representations for constructions with negative adverbs than we do for sentences with negation verbs, and which I propose explicitly in Vennemann (1973b). This principle says that any two discourses that have different surface syntactic representations must have different semantic representations (where I use ‘semantic’ in a broad sense, where some perhaps would use another expression, e.g. “pragmatic’ or ‘pragmato-semantic’).